In the Spaces Between

In the Spaces Between is the first publication dedicated to Arts at CERN, the arts programme of the world’s largest laboratory for particle physics. The collection of essays, stories, poems, reflections, and visual contributions reflects on the encounters between art and science that have emerged over the past decade from the Laboratory’s creative and dynamic environment.

What draws artists to this highly specialised scientific setting? What compels them to engage with the unknown behind experiments and theoretical frameworks? Shaped by the reflective enquiry of creative practice, artists, scientists, and guest contributors explore the spaces between understanding and unknowing, between observation and imagination.

Edited by Mónica Bello, former curator and head of Arts at CERN, the collection invites an open-ended journey navigable through a conceptual index of key themes: → Cosmos, → Dark Matter, → Futurology, → Experiments, → Imagination, → Quantum, and others. These diverse voices converge to engage with the philosophical, aesthetic, and material dimensions of physics. They reflect on research and experimentation, evoking new possibilities of image-making, language, and transmission. Moving through underground tunnels and lingering in caverns, they return to the surface to investigate, reimagine, and ultimately question our understanding of reality.

Situated within the singular context of CERN, In the Spaces Between opens an invitation to explore the shared understandings and creative possibilities that unfold when artists and scientists work alongside one another: an unparalleled landscape for collaboration and insight.